How does on-screen loneliness differ from being alone?

“The prospect of loneliness is probably one of the biggest fears that humans have to contend with. More often than not, this is reinforced by the state of actually being alone, but it’s not automatically synonymous with it.” – Robert Zak

Robert Zak’s blog-post for The Independent: 'Tyrannosaur and Drive: The difference between loneliness and being alone' touches on something interesting, but doesn’t fully develop the theory. After watching Drive (2011) and Tyrannosaur (2011) back to back, he began to ponder the difference between loneliness and being alone. While it was an interesting thesis, Zak only touched the surface of the differences leaving the reader to either think about it more, or to want more. Hopefully this piece will finish where Zak left off.

Drive and Tyrannosaur are from different worlds. They were made in different nations, in different genres, with different narratives and different target audiences. Despite these differences both films have some essential, common themes: rage, protection and being alone. Of course, through the immense differences of the two films, these themes are explored completely differently.

Drive follows the protagonist, Driver (Ryan Gosling), a loner who fills his time with cars, whether it’s fixing them, driving them for races, driving them for petty crooks or for films and in his spare time, he studies car parts. He  builds a relationship with a young mother who moves into his apartment building, but the relationship still manages to maintain a certain isolation for him. This is similar to the film itself, which although has many Hollywood stars, is set in Los Angeles and has a narrative that would not be out of place in most Hollywood studios, the director, Nicholas Winding Refn manages to use a certain stylization to give the film a more ‘independent’ atmosphere, maintaining a certain isolation from Hollywood.

Tyrannosaur drops all pretenses about being slick, glamorous film and adopts a social-realist style well known to British filmmakers. The lead character Joseph (Peter Mullan) isn’t totally alone; he has a couple of friends: his dog Bluey, a racist pub local, Tommy, who doesn’t really know him, and a friend who is dying of cancer. Joseph very quickly drops that number down by kicking Bluey to death in the opening scene.

The key themes of both films, rage and protection run through the lead characters, it is the concept of being alone that makes them so different, and this is due to the difference between being introverted or extroverted. Many people believe that to be extroverted you have to be a happy, charismatic people person. This would rule out Joseph, but the reality is that to be extroverted means that you draw your power from the people around you, in the same vein being introverted means to draw your power from within. Through these definitions Joseph is definitely an extrovert. His power is drawn from his relationships, no matter how small or shallow they appear to be. His power is not the standard idea of strength, but of self-control. When left by himself, Joseph can’t stop his rage from destroying things, whether those things are his dog, a shop window, his shed or a group of youths in the pub. His crippling loneliness allows, or even encourages, his rage and anger to build to the point that it can’t be contained. When faced with another human being though, Joseph is calmed. For example, the constant presence of a young boy across the street stops Joseph from engaging in conflict with the man dating the young boy’s mother. It is this need for a connection that makes Joseph’s first encounter with Hannah (Olivia Colman) so strange. 

Hannah is equally lonely, stuck in an oppressive and violent marriage, her only form of release is religion, but even that is used against her by her husband, James (Eddie Marsan). Joseph first meets Hannah when he has a break-down and finds his way into her charity shop. He shuns all of her beliefs using location and money as a way of distancing himself, but the most interesting way he keeps his emotional distance is with his name. In an attempt to help the man hiding behind a rail of clothes, Hannah asks his name, to which he replies “Robert DeNiro.” He doesn’t want her to know who he is, even down to very basics. Names are the basis to our identities. We are defined by who we are and what we do, but in order to communicate those things every relationship has to begin with introductions and those start with names. It takes both characters’ fears of being alone to bring them together. Although their relationship is built on the foundation of loneliness, it is a co-operative relationship where they both put in as much as they receive and that makes it both genuine and touching.

“Whoever is delighted in solitude, is either a wild beast or a god.”

- Aristotle

The theory of anonymity helping to isolate characters has been well used in cinema. In Layer Cake (2004), Daniel Craig’s character is not named to prove that he is more intelligent, and therefore at an intellectual distance to the audience. But it doesn’t have to create distance. In literature, Truman Capote’s Breakfast at Tiffany’s had an unnamed protagonist, but this only allows for a greater connection with the reader. ‘George’ as he’s referred to, is a blank canvas, a person in a situation, almost vague enough to for anyone to project themselves onto.

So what makes The Driver an introvert (as opposed to Joseph’s extrovert) and what makes him different to Craig’s ‘X’ and Capote’s ‘George’? While Joseph acts completely differently when alone as opposed to with people, the introverted Driver tries to spend as little time with other people as possible and when he does work with others, there is little to no personal connection or effort made on Driver’s part.

Along with having no name, The Driver has no exposition. The audience doesn’t know where he came from, the sort of friends he had growing up or any information similarly needed to judge somebody. He constantly keeps himself busy, and yet doesn’t have any relationships made from what he does. His only real relationship is with his boss Shannon, but even that is a very one-sided conversation.

Whereas Joseph and Hannah’s relationship is genuine, Driver’s relationship with Irene (Carey Mulligan) – the young mother who recently moved into his apartment building seems almost one-sided and shallow. Driver seems happy when with her and clearly goes out of his way to help and protect her and her son, but there is no depth to their relationship. Apart from the apparent happiness he gains from it, Driver puts all the effort in to protect Irene and Benicio, putting himself in constant danger. Or maybe it is the satisfaction of this protection that he strives for, that drives his character, not rage. The blank character allows the audience to conjure as many possible back-stories or possible motivations that they want to, without either confirming or denying them. Unlike Breakfast at Tiffany’s, Drive is too vague, not giving enough of a canvas to project onto, creating not only a distance with the other characters, but with the audience as well.

It is worth noting that there are many other ways to represent loneliness and being alone on the screen. Steve McQueen, for example, creates an incredible world for Michael Fassbender’s Brandon in Shame (2011) to find solidarity. It is not so much that he likes being alone, or that he has nobody, but he is forced into closed off lifestyle by his shame of his sexual addiction. However, returning to the two case studies that Robert Zak originally begun with, it is fair to summarise that both characters despite similarities, deal with the issue of being alone completely differently, but this is as much due to the genres the films as it is to the introverted and extroverted personalities of the protagonists. The British ‘Kitchen Sink, social-realist’ dark and gritty film needs to be open and upsetting to provoke the intended feelings and to fairly represent the issue of domestic violence. Loneliness, as Zak noted, Loneliness is a big fear in our society, and Paddy Considine (Tyrannosaur’s director) manipulates that fear to draw sympathy for an almost unsympathetic character. On the other hand, Drive is almost as much about style as it is about content; it’s about standing out and being different. In an industry full of escapist films, Drive succeeds in not only being different and being escapist, but having a completely unsympathetic and yet utterly compelling and interesting lead character. To summarise their differences in a sentence: Joseph hides his loneliness with aggression, while the Driver hides his aggression by being alone.

Written by Edward L. Corrigan on 17/02/2012

For Robert Zak’s original blog post, see: http://blogs.independent.co.uk/2012/02/10/tyrannosaur-and-drive-the-difference-between-loneliness-and-being-alone/